You might already know about Fresh Merch, Fourth Floor’s custom-built merchandise platform creating bespoke products for content creators, brand clients, and their communities. Launched last year, it’s the product of a long-held desire to provide our creative partners with a next-generation upgrade in agency support and tools. But the Fresh Merch project doesn’t stop there. Next, we’re stepping up to support artists, designers, and illustrators.

Today, we’re proud to announce the next phase of the Fresh Merch initiative. Fresh Talent is a new line of designs and apparel created specifically to showcase and amplify the work of up-and-coming artists. While special, standalone collections will be the backbone of the programme, these artists will also be added to our roster of designers and illustrators who work with our content creator partners, meaning that the breadth of design talent open to Fresh Merch partners continues to grow and diversify. As ever, our mission is to make working with the best talent easier. And we’re making sure our ecosystem is built for the benefit for everyone involved in it.

*Suzie Booton, one of the first two artists to join our Fresh Talent programme, sports one of the designs from her debut collection.*

Where Fresh Merch exists to give content creators a celebratory merchandise platform to gather their whole community and culture around, Fresh Talent is all about giving visual artists an easy, accommodating, and empathetic platform for promotion, recognition, and new avenues of physical sales. Like everything we do, Fresh Talent is conceived and operated from a place of understanding and support, another step in delivering our overarching mission statement to help and nurture creative talent.

Picking up all the product creation, sourcing, manufacture, distribution, and other logistical tasks that the busy artist can find a challenge to juggle against the most important parts of the job (ie. developing their style, honing their craft, producing a portfolio, and otherwise just being an artist), our aim is to deliver an important early lift in presence and exposure while freeing up the professional bandwidth for creatives to simply carry on being creative.

Starting local, taking inspiration from the thriving artistic energy of our home-city of Bristol, we’ve just launched Fresh Talent’s inaugural ranges, designed entirely by our first two artistic discoveries. Suzie Booton is a music and literature-inspired artist putting together a “simply spooky”, witchcraft-riffing collection as an antidote to the madness of modern times, while Joshua Cook’s surreally satirical illustrations puts folklore imagery through a playfully humorous, modern-minded wringer. We’re very excited to have them both on board. Both Suzie’s collection and Josh’s are now live and active on Fresh Merch.

Like all Fresh Talent creatives, they get all of the same personalised product channel benefits as our content creator partners, with bespoke page layouts filled with scope for customisation and unique, supplementary materials to connect with their audience as people as well as artists. Their spaces on the platform will be truly their own. At the same time, we’re being careful not to over-engineer the process, developing everything we put out - in terms of web presence and tangible products for sale - as part of a holistic, collaborative process. This is about the artists first and foremost, and so everything has to match and celebrate their energy and aesthetic.

*Josh, wrapped in one of the first pieces of apparel to showcase his art.*

We’ll have more exciting news on Fresh Talent soon (including full profile articles on both Suzie and Joshua), and we’ll, of course, keep you updated as the platform expands and rolls out further, along the path to our goal of a building and supporting a nationwide roster of artists.

On that note, it goes without saying that we’re now actively looking for exciting new artists, designers, and illustrators to work with, so if you have something you’d like to talk to us about, we’d love to hear all about it. Interested in being part of Fresh Talent? Just drop us a line at support@fourthfloor.co and we’ll get chatting.